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Christianity as Insurrection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

P. Matheson
P. Matheson
Affiliation:
Knox College, PO Box 56, DunedinNew Zealand
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Extract

To suggest that authentic Christianity is an insurrectionary faith, a standing provocation to the conventional values of society is, on the face of it, to invite derision. Yet the ferocity with which the first Christians were persecuted was in no small part due to their subversive teachings and practices which gave women, slaves and artisans ideas above their station. This subversive dimension may often have been forgotten. It can hardly have been very evident to the inhabitants of Wittenberg in 1515, for example, yet within a decade Germany was to be embroiled in an unprecedented crisis of authority, one which led not only to turmoil in the world of student and scholar and cleric, but to the greatest social upheaval prior to the French Revolution, to the uffrur we know as the Peasants' War.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , August 1991 , pp. 311 - 324
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1991

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References

1 This paper is based on a lecture first given in the University of Otago on 22nd June 1989 as part of a Faculty of Theology series, Christianity as Provocation.

2 The Collected Works of Thomas Müntzer (CW), ed. and tr. by Matheson, Peter (Edinburgh: 1988), p. 116Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., p. 101.

4 Cf. Maurer, Justus, Prediger im Bauernkrieg (Calwer Theologische Monographien, 5). Stuttgart, 1979Google Scholar.

5 Cf. the interesting thesis of Alister E. McGrath about the differing emphases of the Lutheran and the South German and Swiss reformation. The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation, Oxford, 1987Google Scholar.

6 CW.p. 117.

7 Ibid., p. 115.

8 ‘Nur wer für die Juden schreit, darf auch gregorianisch singen’, Bethge, Eberhard, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Theologe, Christ, Zeitgenosse (Munich, 1967), p. 685Google Scholar.

9 CW, pp. 396, 389f.

10 Ibid. pp. 220, 222.

11 Ibid., p. 63.

12 cw, p. 244.

13 This became abundantly clear at the largest conference ever devoted to Müntzer, the Zentrale Wissenschafiliche Konferenz — Thomas Müntzer Ehrung, Halle, East Germany, 29th August-1 st September 1989; the recent biographies of Müntzer, from East and West, also emphasise the interplay of socio-political and religious concerns; cf. Goertz, H.-G., Thomas Mūntzer, Mystiker Apokatyptiker Revolutionär, Munich, 1989Google Scholar; Gritsch, Eric, Thomas Müntzer, A Tragedy of Errors, Minneapolis, 1989Google Scholar; Scott, Tom, Thomas Müntzer, Theology and Revolution in the German Reformation, London, 1989CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vogler, Günter, Thomas Müntzer, Berlin, 1989Google Scholar.

14 CW, pp. 408–30; cf. my article, ‘Thomas Müntzer's Marginal Comments on Tertullian’, in Journal of Theological Studies NS Vol. 41, Pt. 1 (1990), pp. 76–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 CW, p. 372.

16 Ibid., p. 340.

17 Ibid., p. 348.

18 Ibid., p. 328.

19 Ibid., p. 348.

20 Cf. his Prague Manifesto; ibid., p. 367.

21 CW, pp. 300, 314.

22 Gemeindereformation: die Menschen des sechszehnten jahrhunderts auf dem Wegzum Heil Munich, 1987Google Scholar; cf. also Conrad, Franziska, Reformation in der bäuerlichen Gesellschaft Zur Rezeption reformatorischer Theologie im Elsass, Stuttgart, 1984Google Scholar.

23 CW, p. 294.

24 Cf. my article, ‘Thomas Müntzer's Vindication and Refutation. A Language for the Common People’. Sixteenth Century Journal, 1989/4.

25 Cf. CW, p. 316.

26 Cf. his Sermon to the Princes, ibid. pp. 230–252; his letter to Frederick the Wise, Ibid., p. 69.

27 Ibid., p. 280.

28 Ibid., pp. 246, 250.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid. p. 157.

31 Ibid., p. 160.

32 Ibid., p. 142.

33 Ibid., p. 335.

34 Ibid., p. 88f.

35 Ibid., p. 332, 357 n. 6; cf. Pagels, Elaine, Adam, Eve and the Serpent. New York, 1988Google Scholar.

36 Ibid., p. 437; caution is in place in evaluating such forced confessions.

37 Ibid., p. 459f.

38 von Klemperer, Klemens, ‘Reflections and Reconsiderations on the German Resistance’, Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 1 (1988), p. 28Google Scholar.

39 The New Zealand Listener, 10th June 1989.

40 CW. p. 208f.